3D Vision and Surround Technology

Imagine immersing yourself in the world of 3D content like never before. Monsters, bullets, and landscapes jump out of your flat monitor and into your imagination, making you part of the game. With NVIDIA® 3D Vision, gaming will never be the same.

2011 is a big year for 3D entertainment, with blockbuster 3D film releases, brand new 3D HDTVs, and expanding the 3D Vision technologies that make stereoscopic 3D for home users an inexpensive and high-quality option.

What surprises most game developers is just how little they may have to do to fully 3D in the games they are making. In fact, many shipping games that were never originally written for stereo already look great in 3D with 3D Vision. Just check out our latest list of supported games!

Lots of games need no modification, but there are simple things that developers can do to make the experience really fantastic - and a few stumbling blocks that developers can avoid to ensure that their game plays well.

How Does It Work?

The NVIDIA 3D Vision products supports the leading 3D products available on the market, including 120Hz desktop LCD monitors, 3D projectors, and DLP HDTVs (complete list of supported displays). The NVIDIA 3D Vision driver can process any game to support all of these displays, so specifics of the display are isolated from the application and game developers don't need to worry about the details. The 3D Vision driver architecture even supports HDMI 1.4 3D TVs using NVIDIA 3DTV Play software.

Inside the driver, each 3D scene gets rendered twice - once for the left eye, and once for the right eye. The driver is able to automatically modify typical 3D game vertex shaders “in flight” so that it can generate the correct images at run time. User options allow players to adjust settings like inter-ocular distance (that is, the amount of “depth”) to their own preference. Developers can explicitly control the stereo aspects of the experience, or just let the driver do its job.

For the best experience, of course, there are a few simple steps that a developer can take to ensure that their game plays its best with 3D Vision, including making sure that player HUD elements are displayed at screen depth, that UI's like crosshair reticules show in depth correctly (screen reticules can be confusing, but laser sights look *incredible* in 3D, as do projectile ballistics!), and that render-to-texture passes follow a few simple rules (that most developers already follow without realizing it).

With a little more effort, developers can take the reins to control their own 3D stereo experiences, altering subtle player-attention controls like dynamic convergence or adding startling out-of-the-screen special effects.

NVIDIA Surround Technology

Imagine expanding your gaming real estate across three displays in Full HD 3D for a completely immersive gaming experience with NVIDIA Surround technology. With the introduction of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 GPUs, you can now use the award winning NVIDIA 3D Vision to build the world's first multi-display 3D gaming experience on your PC.

NVIDIA Surround technology supports both 2D and 3D Vision modes, allowing end users to take advantage of wider field of views.